TRE® Tension, Stress and Trauma Release Exercises

Developed by David Berceli the TRE® tension and trauma releasing exercises are an amazing tool for helping the body let go of deeply held, negative patterns in order to return us to a natural balance where all systems are working in harmony. The exercises are simple and easy to learn and the process of physical and psychological transformation they facilitate is often astonishing and life changing. The goal of the exercises is to start a self-directed, but innate, tremoring process.

The tremors are profound in nature feel very instinctive. They tap into the body’s natural release mechanism to discharge tension and trauma held in the body. Once the client has learned the exercises, and can allow the tremors, they can let the body do its own healing and gently disperse overwhelming experiences a little at a time – without having to re-experience the original trauma.

We do not need to re-visit these events or understand them, especially if they happened before conscious awareness.

For many anxious or over stressed people using cognitive methods of directing the brain to observe the body (such as being asked to ‘imagine feeling calm’ or to ‘find the tension inside’) are impossible. Their ability to do this has been hindered by compound negative experience. Consequently they will often feel worse – ‘I can’t do mediation, I’m even more of a failure’.

An imbalance between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems are often at the root of much of this type of dysfunction. This is both psychological and physiological. The TRE process is a way to bypass this cognitive dilemma and simply asks us to start a new conversation with our body.

Like with EFT, to fully heal from trauma, we need to work with the body and include our physiology in the process to help reset over active reflexes in the nervous system caused by overwhelming events. TRE helps us increase our window of tolerance on the world by reducing the trigger neurophysiology that is stuck in patterns of fight, flight, freeze and play dead.

These patterns can often manifest as insomnia, hypervigilance, anxiety and other physiological complaints such as IBS and migraine.